Marina service
RANSA (Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association)
About
RANSA (Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association) at a glance
Smaller member sailing club at Rushcutters Bay with marina berths, a relaxed atmosphere and mid-range pricing for the area.
Service area: Sydney Harbour
- Marina type
- yacht club marina
- Operator
- RANSA
- Region
- Sydney Harbour
- Water body
- Sydney Harbour (Rushcutters Bay)
- Berth types
- permanent berthing, casual berthing
Facilities and services
- licensed club
- restaurant/cafe
- power & water
- DIY slipway for small yachts
- hardstand
- dinghy storage
- Whaler Bar
- Navy Bear Cafe
- member key after-hours access
- venue hire with own catering
- radio-controlled yacht group
About RANSA (Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association)
The Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association occupies the 'Tin Shed', a heritage-listed weatherboard clubhouse on the water at Rushcutters Bay that stands on the site of Australia's oldest extant naval base. RANSA has always been the navy's own sailing club, founded to give serving and former naval personnel affordable access to the harbour, and it retains that democratic character: membership categories run from serving ADF members at 205 dollars a year through to sailing, crew and country members, every one including Australian Sailing affiliation. The atmosphere is deliberately casual, a volunteer-run club where the Whaler Bar fills with crews after twilight racing and the Navy Bear Cafe, part of the local Bird and Bear group, serves breakfast and lunch over the water. Sailing activity is the club's centre of gravity: Friday twilight social racing through summer, winter racing on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, the RANSA Regatta each February, Pirates Day in March, a cruising division that ranges the harbour and Pittwater, and even a radio-controlled yacht group racing in the adjacent pond on Wednesdays. The club hosts one round of the Sydney Harbour Women's Keelboat Series. Compared with its grand neighbour, the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, RANSA is smaller, cheaper and more relaxed, and its berths, moorings and DIY slipway are priced to keep ordinary sailors on the water rather than to maximise revenue. The clubhouse itself, plain and practical, is part of the attraction: a genuine piece of working harbour heritage rather than an architect's statement, with the water lapping under the floor and the city skyline filling the windows.
Marina facilities
Boat facilities are members-focused and priced accordingly. Marina berths run at 12,150 dollars a year billed quarterly, swing moorings at 95 to 110 dollars per foot per year depending on vessel length, hardstand space at 7,415 dollars a year, and dinghy storage at 350 dollars annually, all subject to availability and offered to boat-owning members first. Casual moorings, when free, go at 50 dollars a day or 250 a week. The club keeps a slipway for do-it-yourself slipping of small yachts, charged at 100 dollars on weekdays and 150 on weekends, a genuine rarity on the eastern harbour where slipping is otherwise a commercial yard transaction. Power and water serve the marina berths. The clubhouse supplies the social infrastructure: the Whaler Bar with member discounts on already inexpensive drinks, the Navy Bear Cafe offering members a further 10 to 15 percent off and members-only table bookings, a galley members can hire with their own catering for private functions, barbecues accessed by member key after hours, and venue hire of the waterfront rooms for corporate functions, birthdays and weddings. A member's key gives after-hours access to the whole club. Reciprocal rights extend to affiliated clubs around the country. The membership proposition is bluntly stated by the club itself as the best-value yacht club membership on Sydney Harbour, and the fee schedule, with crew membership at 220 dollars, backs the claim. There is no fuel, no chandlery and no paid dockmaster service; members look after their own boats, which is precisely the point.
Local sailing knowledge
Rushcutters Bay is the densest concentration of recreational sailing infrastructure in Australia: RANSA's Tin Shed, the CYCA next door, the d'Albora marina on the northern side, and hundreds of swing moorings filling the bay between them. The water is protected and the sailing starts within minutes of leaving the berth, but the bay itself is too crowded with moorings for comfortable anchoring, and is best treated as a departure point. Boxing Day brings the harbour's biggest crowd as the Sydney Hobart fleet musters off the CYCA, and RANSA members watch the start from a few hundred metres away. Ashore, Rushcutters Bay Park wraps the foreshore, Edgecliff station is a ten-minute walk, and the restaurants of Potts Point, Darlinghurst and Double Bay are close enough for crew dinners. The club's naval heritage gives it quirks visitors notice: trophies and memorabilia from decades of fleet sailing, a start boat named RANSA One recently replaced by member fundraising, and the Samuel Pepys Trophy the club proposed for small yachts in the Hobart race back in 1958. Parking near the club is tight on race days. For visiting sailors with reciprocal rights, the routine is simple: sign in, find a berth or mooring through the office, and turn up on a Friday in summer with a crew and an appetite for the post-race sausage and prizegiving in the Whaler Bar. The parkland behind the club was once a shallow tidal bay where Sydney's first settlers cut rushes for thatch, which is how the suburb got its name.